Rahul must apologise on Islamic State:BJP

Courtesy : Agencies25/08/2018 08:41

BJP on Thursday attacked Rahul Gandhi for saying that exclusionary policies regarding development lead to the formation of terrorist groups like ISIS. Addressing a press conference, BJP Spokesperson Sambit Patra asked Rahul Gandhi to explain his comments. Patra also said that Rahul Gandhi has denigrated the minorities of the country. Patra said that Rahul Gandhi's comments are deplorable and he must come out with explanation. Gandhi is on a four day tour of Europe.

Rahul said in Germany, that when people are excluded from the process of development, they resort to hate and violence. “It is very dangerous in the 21st century to exclude people. If you don’t give people a vision in the 21st century somebody else will give them one,” he said. Rahul cited the example of the Islamic state, saying that when a US Law excluded a certain Iraqi tribe from joining government services after the Iraq War, it created an insurgency which eventually led to the formation of the terror group.

Gandhi said the incidents of lynching were a result of the anger emanating from joblessness and destruction of small businesses due to demonetization and poorly implemented Goods and Services Tax. Saying that the transformation taking place across the world requires certain protections for the common people, Gandhi accused the BJP dispensation of taking away these protections and hitting the informal economy through demonetization and GST.

"They (the BJP government) feel tribal communities, poor farmers, lower caste people, minorities shouldn't get the same benefits as the elite. The other thing they've done is they've started attacking the support structures created to help certain groups of people. That's not the only damage they've done," he said.

Gandhi said there is "something much more dangerous" that has happened, and that is - a couple of years ago the prime minister "demonetized the Indian economy and destroyed cash flows to small and medium businesses, rendering millions jobless". The Congress president addressed the gathering for more than an hour. He also took questions from students from across the world.

During his address, Gandhi said that after the US attacked Iraq in 2003, they brought a law that stopped a particular tribe in Iraq from getting jobs in the government and in the army. "It seemed like a very innocuous decision at that time," he said. But it resulted in a large number of people joining insurgency "that fought the US and caused massive casualties," he said.